‘I became a dad and all I could feel was resentment’

Julian Furman had always wanted children, and had been the driving force behind starting a family – but when his daughter arrived, so too did the bottles of scotch, the loneliness and the rage. It all came to a head in a confrontation with his own father

Julian Furman: ‘I had never felt so alone.’
Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

I only realised I had a problem the moment I tried to punch my father, missed by a mile, and collapsed in a heap in the gutter beside my favourite restaurant. I don’t recall why we were outside, but I had finished quite a few fingers of scotch, and perhaps as the tone of my voice rose, we had thought it better to sojourn. I remember the fury, though: he had casually asked if everything was all right, and, as my tongue froze and my blood boiled, as I failed to find the words to carve a flippant lie, all I could think of was the humiliation implicit in the question – that my own dad would not empathise with the turmoil that becoming a father had had on my life.

A few months earlier, I had stood in a London hospital room, awestruck, as my daughter – my first child – emerged into the world. I had been the one who wanted children, who had pressured my wife to start a family, and as I held the pink, prune-like package in my arms, I was overwhelmed with emotions I had never felt before. I was elated at the miracle of existence and mortified at my unpreparedness, at how there was no going back.

Although we still shared a home and a bed, I felt I’d lost my partner and best friend. I had never felt so alone

For days, I grappled silently with those contradictory sentiments, hiding them behind a nervous, fake smile. A father’s role is like the best friend in that movie you forget as soon as the credits roll: the support act to fill in the blanks, clean up the mess, do the dishes off-screen and follow on a safe distance behind, out of focus. There were bottles to be sterilised, baths to be scrubbed, nappies to be changed in a new, perpetual, monotonous routine.

I wanted to talk to my wife, but her obligations were all-consuming, and she was overcome with exhaustion. Although we still shared a home and a bed, it seemed that the unspoken emotional compact that had underpinned our relationship for so many years had been dissolved. With each day of silence and service, my uncertainties grew and ballooned and metastasised into something that felt a lot like resentment. I had lost my partner and my best friend; I had never felt so alone.

Perhaps if I had talked to someone then, I would not have begun to spiral, but stoicism is a toxic pillar of society’s accepted principles of masculinity.

In my family, where the patriarch was always a “sacrificing” breadwinner (my father spent decades working in China while we, his family, remained in London), I was expected to do what must be done without complaint, to silently shoulder the burden. I could not talk to my friends, could not tell them the truth for fear of seeming weak – as weak and vulnerable and dangerous to myself as I actually was – and so, as the days passed and the memories of our life before began to recede, I searched for paths of escape.

It was my wife who saved me, the same wife who was shouldering the ceaseless burden of new motherhood

The bottles of scotch multiplied on top of our fridge. The nights grew warmer, and I would venture out to the parks and beaches of the city where we were now living, spaces shared with the homeless and drug-addicted, waiting for time to pass and the pain to end. As Euro 2012 sprang into life, I watched every game at the bar up the street, pressed into the braying scrum of bodies, supporting no team, not saying a word, alone with my drink. I was consumed by an unacknowledged rage that, as my world shrank, wanted only to destroy me, us, and our little life.

In the years since, I have witnessed many new fathers experience the same sense of hopelessness, watched them disappear down a rabbit hole of isolation as they insist, as I did, that everything is fine. One, living with his family in a tiny one-bedroom flat, gave up even entering the bedroom, evicted nightly as “the baby can’t sleep with you here”; another took to sleeping in the office to avoid going home; another closed the door on his life and began again. Too many more engaged in impulsive and vindictive retaliations, or let their simmering discontent damage their relationships in manners difficult to repair. The connective tissue between every story? “I couldn’t speak to anyone.”

It was my wife who saved me, the same wife who was shouldering the ceaseless burden of new motherhood and realigning her own life and self at least as much as I was. She begged me constantly to reconnect, to share with her in the fleeting beauty of those early moments, but each attempt at reconciliation drove me further away. As our friendship soured and my bitterness polluted every fleeting interaction, as the life-expectancy of each bottle of scotch dwindled, she took our daughter in her arms and searched for help.

In praise of fathers, mostly

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There was no conversation. “Please,” she begged, pushing a piece of paper with a name and a phone number across the table one morning. “For us.” A few days later I found myself sitting in a bright room, a clinical psychologist smiling kindly at my hunched, defensive form. Over the subsequent months, I laid bare for him, and for myself, the fears, anxieties and expectations, the reprehensible inadequacies that I had sworn to myself weren’t there. Giving them a voice, recognising them for what they were allowed me to begin healing myself and the family I was well on the way to destroying.

Having a child is violently disruptive. So much of the system of awareness and support is concentrated on new mothers, and rightly so, but ignoring the needs of, and effects on, new fathers creates vast destructive ripples that emanate from wounded and often self-destructive souls. Ultimately, assistance and acceptance, exposing the conspiracy of silence for the blight that it is, allowed me to embrace the most challenging and rewarding experience of my life, my family and I emerging stronger. Discarding prehistoric notions of masculinity and sharing experiences while defusing unrealistic expectations – letting fathers understand that it is reasonable, even expected, to grapple for stability as the ground shifts abruptly under their feet – could spare so many young families so much needless suffering. To begin, all that is required is for us to talk.

• This Is How We Talk, a novel of Tel Aviv by Julian Furman is published by Freight Books, £9.99. To order a copy for £8.49, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on orders of more than £10, online only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.